Back in the EVE Saddle

A month ago I began my third trial of EVE Online after reading a convincing article (part 2, part 3). I decided to jump in the deep end and stir up trouble. Previously, I had fallen into pitfalls or made up reasons why I discontinued playing. Friends of mine will cite the same excuses for not playing, so I decided to enumerate and debunk them.

"I can't fly the ship how I want."

Players often expect avatar control to be transferable across games. WASD is the de facto control scheme for any game in which the player assumes a character. Players expect familiar interfaces. How a planar movement model would work with three dimensional space is an unaddressed question. If not WASD, players expect something akin to a flight simulator or Tie Fighter.

The issue really stems from the simplification of the controls. In EVE a destination is selected, and then the Approach/Orbit/Warp button is pressed. Manual flight is as simple as double-clicking anywhere in space. Players' ship controls are abstracted to the point where player agency feels stifled. Fumbling over controls to move from A to B can be frustrating.

This awkwardness can be overcome, but it feels like relearning to walk. While the tutorial does have content to help the player move about in space, it takes several sessions to get accustomed to it. It becomes second nature eventually.

I should also point out that EVE is not a space flight simulator nor a shooter--don't expect the game to meet those genre criteria. The game must be approached with an open mind; it is unlike anything else.

"I have no idea where I am."

This attitude also derives from the control abstraction. Players move about with what seems like lists of planets, stations, and warp gates. How all these objects relate to each other spatially can be a mystery.

There are two tools in game that I think can be helpful: the Map and the Mapbrowser. The map (F10) defaults to the Star Map of the whole galaxy and can be confusing. In the World Map Control, there is a button labeled "Solar System Map". This is a navigable view of the current solar system. It displays all the planets, stations, and warp gates in positions such that players can understand where these objects are.

Additionally there is a Mapbrowser (F11) which displays 4 panes on the side of the player's screen (Universe, Region, Constellation, and Solar System). Only the bottom, Solar System pane is useful: it displays a flat representation of the system as well as a white cone showing the direction the player camera is currently facing. It helps to put celestial objects in perspective.

The maps at Dotlan are also very helpful.

"Combat is boring."

I agree that solo combat against mission NPCs is boring, which is why I don't do missions. But EVE is not really a fast-paced action game. It is slower and tactical. Where, when, and how to approach a target is paramount. Knowing when to activate, "pulse", and overheat modules assures victory against smarter or better-armed opponents.

It is also worth noting that there is no such thing as a fair fight in EVE. PvP in MMORPGs is about exploiting advantages, cheating, using every trick up your sleeve to win the day. This is what "world PvP" is, and exactly what Battlegrounds and Arena are not. An unwritten rule of EVE is "always assume your target has friends". Kill him before they arrive :) When I want a fair fight, I play TF2 or a board game.

PvP is emotionally charged. This is the sole reason I gave EVE another chance--the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat after my heart races and my mind defends that which could be lost. I can analyze and read literature explaining the exact effects and chemicals that I am experiencing, but adrenalin and fear of loss are visceral, and I want to be swept away by my animal instincts.

"I can't be competitive."

Since training is all time-based in EVE, players assume that they cannot catch up to the veterans. While they may never catch up in raw Skill Points, they could catch up in a singular role. EVE is very wide, and veterans can fly a variety of ships, but only one at a time. As long as players set their sights on a single ship and fit, they get get there quickly and be competitive. And skills are often prerequisites and stepping stones for more powerful modules and ships.

To give you some numbers (for PvP):

• Within a week, you can fly a throw-away Cruiser.
• In a week and a half, you can fly throw-away Battlecruisers.
• Within 2 weeks, you can fly a tech 2 fitted Frigate.
• In 5 weeks, you can fly a tech 2 fitted Interceptor or Assault Frigate.
• In a month an a half, that Cruiser and Battlecruiser can have tech 2 modules.
• In 3 months, you could be sitting in a very formidable tech 2 Cruiser (AKA Heavy Assault Cruiser).

Cruisers and Battlecruisers are staples of small gang PvP. Even though newbies won't be packing much heat without tech 2 guns, they are still an asset to the fleet. These ships can get really cheap, too, which helps when players are learning the ropes. I calculated that the Rupture cruiser I bought cost me 8,836,500 ISK. Insurance pays out 6,875,000 ISK, meaning the total loss would only be 2,360,500 ISK. That is practically free. (I would equate 1 million ISK to 1 WoW Gold.)

Players can easily earn more money than they can spend if they leave the beaten path and try things other than missions. Within a few hours and in cheap frigates, a fresh character can make 40 million ISK an hour from ninja salvaging and hacking. Or you could scam your way to trillions.

"I don't have the time."

Some players think that they need to invest vast amounts of time or know everything about EVE in order to play. Null-sec territory wars might require players to log in for 6 hours at a time while a station is being attacked, but small gang PvP can be very spontaneous and take only an hour block.

If long sessions are few and far between, there is plenty to do solo in and out of game. I spend half my EVE time reading about EVE. That includes fits and modules, planning training, how wormholes work, can I fight a ship belonging to a certain class, and miracle stories of raid fights. EVE is as much a context for my learning about EVE as it is a game. I am enjoying the whole package.

EVE really is about finding the fun. The game will not deliver fun-cakes to you, but instead give you ingredients to bake your own, or a machine gun to steal someone else's. Other players are my content, and I am content for other players. Players who are willing to learn and are open minded about the game will find it to be a treasure trove.

Within a month: I've roamed around lowsec looking for fights that never happened; stole millions of ISK from players running missions; lost ~10 frigates; was podded in a gate camp; joined a player corporation which received a Declaration of War a week later; and prepared for war that ended in 2 days. And all of it was really fun.

Plus all my ship names come from the Space Mutiny episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Congratulations on the insurance on your ship. A very wise choice indeed. This letter is to confirm that we have issued an insurance contract for your ship, Stump Beefgnaw (Rupture) at a level of 100.0%.

You Don't Talk about FF14

Final Fantasy XIV has been undoing many changes over the last year. It is slowly letting itself become... *dramatic pause* Tyler Durden FFXI.

Most recently in development has been an official Job System, with unlock quests and everything. It has moved away from the convoluted Physical Level and Job Rank nonsense into a more traditional Level and Experience system. It's added Chocobos and Air Ships (albeit not unique to FFXI). They've removed the poorly designed Stamina combat system and replaced it with a more traditional cooldown and autoattack system.

Something unique they are working on is a Materia System (related to FF7's Materia only nominally). Use weapons, convert 'experienced' weapons to Materia, socket Materia on to new weapons.

The combat system chances are on-going, and it will take at least 2 more patches until things are "balanced". So maybe the game will be worth playing right when SWTOR arrives on the scene to steal its thunder.

The Power of External Rewards Compels You

This seems like the quickest way to make sure no one reads your painstakingly created cut scenes and dialogue trees.

I don't listen to my friends' stories unless they entice me with candy.

Time, Money, and the Journey

A discussion of the Diablo 3 $AH took place on our TF2 forums, and someone commented:

it all just seems silly to me.. why play the game if you're going to buy your way to the end result? I've spent $4 on tf2.. and I still look at it as a waste.. items will come and go, and there is always trading.. same goes with diablo3, why pay for pixels that you can obtain yourself and they're obviously going to continue releasing bigger and better weapons that you're going to replace said weapon with, and I see it happen in WoW all the time.. people pay for gold, buy the new shiny off the auction house, and the next day they win a drop in a raid thats better.. $20 down for a days' virtual satisfaction. Its all fickle to me lol

The following was my response.

Diablo, like other action-focused computer RPGs, is designed to be very Achievement oriented. The heavy Goal-Oriented-Play coupled with high-accessibility (and very few set backs, i.e. punishment) fosters an environment where the ends of playing the game are the achievements themselves. For many Achievers, there is no longer any fun in the journey--they want as many vacuous trophies as quickly as possible. There is nothing wrong with getting your jollies from virtual shinies, but here is where the contention lies.

Traditionalist gamers have been, I believe, vaccinated from these psychological lures. They have seen leaderboards and Skinner boxes for decades. If they play a game, they enjoy learning the system, assuming that system is complex enough to hold their interest. If they play strategy games, they enjoy complex resource management. If they play RPGs, they like the journey. They are OK with gating content, with stratifying players into Haves and Have-Nots.

They have been trained to believe that Time and Skill equates to Power. To Traditionalists, games are a great equalizer. The Real World does not leak into their synthetic worlds, and each player's reputation (and Power) are built via in-game means only. This is a fallacy.

The person playing the game has a certain amount of real world resources and real world dexterity. Resources come in the form of Time and Money. Dexterity is both Mental and Physical. Different game genres tap these 4 attributes differently. MMORPGs typically require Time. TF2 takes Physical and Mental dexterity, as well as practice Time. What we are seeing in the Game Industry is the incorporation of Money resources.

This transformation is occurring because many Traditionalists are opting for other responsibilities: jobs and families. They no longer have 10 hours a day to throw at Everquest or StarCraft. They can't wait around for 2 hours to get a game started; they need high-accessibility games. Lowering the barrier to entry is also allowing brand new players to enter the scene. This is the explosion of Casual and Social gaming. These players have Money, but no Time. And quite a few of them are willing to trade their Money for Power. Believe it or not, there are markets that enjoy Paying to Win. This makes Traditionalists exclaim, "WTF ARE YOU DOING?!"

The Time-rich no longer have the upper hand, and that makes the status quo feel as if their time isn't as valuable. And they are correct: with the inclusion of Money, it inflates the resource supply. Buying characters, power leveling, and gold was and still is seen as cheating in various online games primarily because it devalues the achievements (i.e. Time) of players.

To more directly answer your question, "why would someone drop $20 for such an ephemeral trophy?" we really have to answer why humans trade resources for ANY status-signalling good. Fashion, competition, self-worth, belonging to a group: all of these are deeply rooted social instincts. The next time you do a farming run for a piece of loot, ask yourself why are you trading your time for these synthetic goods. And then ask if you'd rather trade money instead. If the goal is the trophy, it really doesn't matter how you got it. If you value the story attached to the trophy, then hopefully the journey is worth taking--and that is something money can't buy.

Farmville's merits as a game do not matter.

What of heroin's merits as a drug? Does it do a great job of expanding people's minds and letting them see mundane experiences in new and interesting ways? Does it bring people together to help one another? Can it help people who have legitimate medical problems by reducing their suffering?

People don't do heroine because of its abstract, broader merits as a drug. They do heroin because it feels good and because doing heroine makes you want to do more heroin. We don't analyze heroin in the hopes of discovering how to make commercial drug products more addictive and deride heroin for being "not a drug."

Farmville is an effective social parasite and advertising mechanism. The game is designed directly to extract money from players. Analyzing it as only a game is pointless, because its manifestation as a game is just the very blunt tip of a sprawling iceberg. Analyze it as a business. Compare it to direct mailing, viral videos, and banner ads.

Farmville is the ultimate sign of the commoditization (not really the traditional sense of the word--the mass marketization is more what I mean) of gaming. The games industry is maturing. "Make games we want to make and hope we get paid for it" has been replaced by "make games that we will get paid to make." The same happened to the music industry--and will happen to any art-based industry as it matures. The business model now drives, not the content. The cascade of free-to-play games and nickle-and-diming DLC are the first steps large steps down this long road. Sequelitis is merely a symptom. We can't go back to the good old days (if they even existed), we must recognize the shape of this beast and confront it directly.

This is another reason why I have stopped playing MMOs.

[EDIT: Made some corrections thanks to an anonymous commenter who apparently deleted his comment...]

Investment Hurdle

I stopped playing Vanguard the day I wrote my previous blog post. I chose to partake in some other activities, and by the time my friends and I had an evening together to play, none of us cared anymore. Not even off newbie island, I didn't feel like investing more time into the game.

I always seem to reflect back and compare MMORPGs to FFXI. That game requires even more investment than Vanguard, and I've always warned people that the first 10 levels are the worst, since they are soloed. (With the addition of solo kill quests, I'm sure the first 20 levels are now awfully boring.) I played with friends, and the majority quit before level 5. Why did I put up FFXI? Was I naive? Did I illogically try to recuperate the sunk cost of the retail box?

Even World of Warcraft sucked me in, but later instantiations of it (AoC, LotRO, WAR, Aion) had no draw, no power over me. I paid for boxes for some of those games, yet didn't want to invest in them any further.

Do MMORPGs need to be shockingly different for me to want to play them? If that were the case, I would have fallen in love with EVE or Darkfall.

Maybe I need long-term goals. I remember wanting to be a Summoner/Dragoon in FFXI (which is completely ridiculous, but drove me to get over the investment hurdle). I was in love with Infernals ever since WarCraft 3--I played Undead for that very reason--and I played a Warlock in WoW just to have that ability.

I am curious if you remember your first long-term goal in your MMORPGs of choice. Was it a story arc, an ability, a feature? Do you find yourself running into brick walls after a few hours with a new MMORPG? Would seeing a cool looking sword or amazing spell effect persuade you to continue?

Measuring Micromanagement In Design

I have been struggling with how to actually quantify micromanagement in strategy game design. Which designs lead to more required micro and which kinds eschew micro for broader strategic manipulation and planning?

I still hold to the concept that strategy games should be about testing your planning capabilities against an opponent's. There are games in the "strategy" genre that focus on execution more than planning, astute observers usually refer to these games as "Tactical."

This post will summarize a number of factors involved in determining how much micromanagement a game design will require of its players.

Mechanical Scope

The scope of a game acts as a multiplier for individual unit micromanagement requirements. A game like Company of Heroes has a severely limited scope. You have perhaps ten manipulable units on the field at the height of an average game. Note that we don't care about the literal soldiers on the battlefield here, we care about manipulable units. What the manipulable unit consists of doesn't matter--all that matters is that when you issue orders, you must give them to the entire unit.

Scope can be confusing to think about, because Company of Heroes and Men of War share the same metaphorical scope--that being less than ten squads of infantry and less than five vehicles. If you examine mechanical scope by thinking about then number of manipulable units, you'll see that Men of War has a wider mechanical scope because each individual soldier in each squad can be manipulated, whereas you can never subdivide squads in Company of Heroes.

Orders per Unit

Once you have figured out how many units players handle when they play the game, you then have to examine what each of those units can do. In turn-based games, this is easy because you can look at possible orders per unit per turn. In real-time games the calculus becomes a bit more difficult because you must look at the number of orders that can be given to units as well as the number of units that may demand attention at once. (I'll address the issue of unit count variance throughout matches at some later time.)

How many kinds of orders can you give to units on a given turn? In Tactics Ogre, you can move, attack, and turn each of your units in each turn. Silent Storm, in comparison, allows you to do any combination of moves, attacks, turns, pose changes, and aiming actions in a turn. Clearly units in Silent Storm require more micro-management. In a turn-based game this affects how fast the game can be played. Games with a lot of micromanagement should have battles resolved in a relatively low number of turns, lest the player tire of the endless manipulation of his units.

We can also look at the number of kinds of unit actions in an RTS as well. In Men of War, you can give your units a wide variety of orders--there are easily over ten kinds of orders (ex. attack, attack-move, move, change stance, reload, change ammo, lay sandbags, lay barbed wire, lay mines, rotate, change weapon, manage inventory, etc.) Men of War has a wider mechanical scope than Company of Heroes, and Company of heroes has fewer than half the number of kinds of orders. Generally a unit in CoH will be able to attack, attack-move, move, change firing mode, and use one or two special abilities. We can therefore categorically say that CoH requires less micro to play effectively than Men of War does.

Complexity of terrain also plays a role. If terrain is very complex, like in Men of War where each wall, building, and piece of debris can be used as cover from any side, the fine-positioning of units matters which causes the player to have to move units more often and with more precision.

Analyzing individual orders

Playing a strategy game consists elementarily of multiple players (some of them may be AIs) giving orders to units. We've examined the nuances of order volume and how it effects micro-management, but we must also examine how the game designer defines the game world and how orders interact with it. We must examine the nature of orders and note how much attention they demand and how much physical precision on the part of the player they require.

In Men of War, you have to take line of sight and line of fire into account whenever you position a unit. You need to make sure there isn't some small rise in the terrain between your unit and what you want it to shoot at.This means that you have to minutely tweak the movement of individual squad members so that they will stand in a optimal-enough position. The difference between a decisive victory and a terrible defeat can be as small as a machine gunner standing slightly out of cover or being in the wrong stance and not having line of sight on an area. There's a lot of micro required when even issuing individual orders in Men of War.

In Company of Heroes, you move an entire unit and its members decide where to stand. Line of sight and line of fire are pretty easy to intuit based on what the map looks like. Rarely are there small hills that will maddeningly block your line of fire without being immediately noticeable. You also know that the simulation isn't terribly precise in Company of Heroes, so if one guy is standing out of cover but you still have the green shield next to your unit's icon, the unit is OK and you don't have to make more adjustments. When giving movement orders in Company of Heroes, you need to do less work--there's less micro--than when giving movement orders in Men of War.

As we've seen, strict simulation can lead to a signficant increase in micromanagement requirements.

The amount of tweaking you have to do to each unit also is greatly effected by the interface. Men of War gives you no particularly good way to check the line of sight and line of fire of your units, so you have to press a number of keys to check to see if your machine gunner can fire over this overturned crate or if they'll just stand there staring dumbly at it as the enemy mops up the rest of his squad.

Too dumb to leave alone?

In RTSes micromanagement requirements also stem from poor or non-existant AI. If you have to constantly babysit your units in order for them to survive, as you do in Men of War, the micro-requirement balloons. RUSE has a lower requirement for micro, though, because units will make attempts to kite enemies who have shorter range and generally try to fire at the most important targets first.


What else?

Please leave a comment if you think I've missed something. I'm sure I haven't touched on all the factors--I've primarily focused on combat.